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| == Services == | == Project Goal == |
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| Initially, something like the following services will be needed: | Build a DoC '''Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud, very like Amazon EC2''' ("Elastic Compute Service") which presents a ''secure and convenient web interface'' which enables users of DoC to ''specify and create VMs and associated storage, automatically install OSes on them and deploy them''. |
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| * Virtual-machine hosting / automated provisioning facility (Amazon EC20-a-like). * Persistent backing-store for VM images (perhaps Amazon S3-style, perhaps Amazon Elastic Block Service-style, perhaps distributed filesystem). * High-performance POSIX file-store access / scratch areas (perhaps in-cloud or perhaps separate from the cloud). |
The main goal is to virtualize most research servers, decoupling the OS image from the hardware for greater flexibility. Sharing (amortizing) the costs of each machine. One driver of this is EPSRC deciding to only provide 50% of any hardware bid over £10K in future, with the Dept expected to pay the remaining 50%. |
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| In relation to scalable storage options, we've already been thinking about these for a while; see also: [[internal/project/Storage-NG|Storage-NG]]. | This project will definitely proceed, having been approved by Executive Committee and by two open meetings of Academic staff. |
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| Candidate software to investigate, solving all or part of the private iaas cloud problem, includes: | Peter McBrien (PJM) is leading the project, and has laid out two stages: |
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| * OpenStack: claims to do most of the job - VM provisioning, interface with KVM, Xen etc (subproject "Nova") and S3-alike storage system (project "Swift"). Also can integrate to (eg. Ceph, GlusterFS) for filesystem-based distributed storage. Also, Nova has an iSCSI client storage plugin too. | 1. a 6 month phase in which CSG (advised by an academic working group) will design and build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, possibly for 6 months in the first instance. The Department will spend some significant amount of money to build the prototype cloud, perhaps in the £100-200K range. |
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| * CloudStack: Citrix open source project, donated to Apache Foundation, rather similar to the above. | 2. assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers would then be encouraged to add research-funded hardware to the cloud and given some form of preferential treatment on "their hardware". All members of CSG are enthusiastic to gain cloud-related skills from the "Cloud Manager". (By the way, the Cloud Manager will do non-cloud-related systems administration too). |
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| * VM seed/runtime image storage: * [[http://openstack.org/projects/storage/|OpenStack Swift]] distributed object store. (Implements Amazon S3 only) * [[http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/|Sheepdog]] distributed image storage. * High-performance distributed POSIX file-stores: * [[http://ceph.newdream.net/|Ceph]] distributed object store / block-device / filesystem. DWM evaluated: Conclusion - not ready yet. * [[http://www.gluster.org/|Gluster]] distributed filesystem. DWM evaluating. Looking rather promising. No "storage head node", i.e. bottleneck! * [[http://www.moosefs.org/|MooseFS]] distributed filesystem. * [[http://www.fhgfs.com/cms/|Fraunhofer Parallel File System]] distributed filesystem, no storage head node, BUT NO REPLICATION, pure striping. Discovered by SM. Conclusion: not suitable. |
Most crucially: (despite not knowing the exact set of services to provide, let alone how to implement them, or having yet appointed a Cloud Manager person) the Department's £100-200K investment '''must be fully spent before the end of July'''. This means that all kit must be ordered, delivered and paid for before the 31st of July. With the Olympics making deliveries difficult, this means that everything must have been ordered by 1st July. |
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| At present, the options for scalable high-performance general purpose NFS filers suitable for storing home dirs, research volumes etc are either expensive or not yet mature. The above POSIX filestores may well be suitable for the "inner problem" of VM storage. Upgrading existing NFS fileservers to 10Gb is definitely also worth trying (first). * Virtualization software: * [[http://www.xen.org/|Xen]] paravirtualization tools. * [[http://www.linux-kvm.org/|KVM]] (para)-virtualization tools. * VMware ESX virtualization software - commercial. * [[http://libvirt.org/|libvirt]] VM abstraction and management layer. * [[http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/|Ganeti]] VM management system. * [[http://openstack.org/projects/compute/|OpenStack Nova]] VM management system [uses Xen, KVM or VMware under the hood]. The virtual-machine management layer will need to support accounting for resource utilization by the VMs spawned for a given user or group, live migration of VMs from one host to another, and will likely need to support automated backups / snapshots of at least SOME historical virtual-machine disk state. (Note that this differs from existing doctrine, which specifies that the machine-local OS data is expendable, and can be regenerated.) The use of seed images, data de-duplication, and/or copy-on-write would also be valuable for minimising storage requirements. |
Re: amount to spend, Anne O'Neill (AON) and Peter McBrien (PJM) suggested CSG prepare possible collections of commodity hardware, on the assumptions that either £100K, £150K and £200K (inc vat) would be spent. |
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| Sometime in early 2012, Susan told DCW that DoC were thinking of hiring | In January 2012, Susan told DCW that DoC were thinking of hiring |
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| private cloud. Essentially she said that Exec Committee has found some significant pot of money which needs to be spent this financial year. |
private cloud. Exec Committee had agreed this, were happy to spend some significant pot of money - this financial year. |
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| them up, install "linux du jour" on them, configure fileservers (if part of cluster), tape backups (if part), processing node special software etc. |
them up, install "linux du jour" on them [which changes each year], configure fileservers (if part of cluster), tape backups (if part), processing node special software etc. |
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| tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, CSG install that virtual cluster node's OS, researchers work as before - but each node is encapsulated |
tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, the creation process should automatically install a CSG-supported operating system (historically supported Linuxes and Windows versions) on the new VM. Researchers work as before on each VM - but each node is encapsulated |
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| Various discussions with PJM and AON followed. Project will definitely proceed. In two stages: |
We would also gain to flexibility to create short-term VMs for specific "run this software" experiments. They would then be automatically destroyed. |
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| 1. a 6 month phase to build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, either temporary or permanent. The Department will spend some significant amount of money, perhaps in the £100-200K range. | We could even give every DoC user (students and staff!) their very own VM when they join, with full root/admin access - or at least the ability to create one when they first need it (lazy evaluation:-)). |
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| 2. assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers then have the option of adding hardware to the cloud. All members of CSG will become skilled in cloud-related topics, and the "Cloud Manager" will do non-cloud-related problem solving too. | Various discussions with CSG, PJM and AON followed, clarifying things quite a lot. |
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| Most crucially: (despite not knowing the exact spec, services to provide, let alone how to implement them) we therefore need to purchase all the kit having it delivered in July 2012, before the Olympics. PJM added "build a private cloud like Amazon EC2 does", AON suggested a budget of £100K, £150K or even £200K - we will provide possible plans for these price levels. |
== Open Staff cloud meetings == |
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| DWM has spent a lot of time evaluating Ceph as a possible S3/Elastic Block Store like storage system for supporting VM storage and possibly very high speed filesystems eg. staging areas for VM data (scaleout NAS with replication). So far: it's not there yet, at least as a fast POSIX filesystem. Alternatives need to be looked at as well.. |
In April 2012, the discussion was opened out to all interested staff, and (so far) two open staff cloud meetings have been held. Here are some notes taken by DCW and LDK of the discussions at both meetings. |
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| == Staff Working Group meetings == | [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-03|Open Staff Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012]] |
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| [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-03|Staff Working Group Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012]] | [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-25|Open Staff Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012]] |
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| [[internal/project/privatecloud/meeting-2012-04-25|Staff Working Group/Open Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012]] | == Cloud Services and Software Investigations == CSG have been performing initial investigations of hardware to buy, whether all commodity or investigating commercial filers like NetApp, and possible software that might be able to implement some/all of the required iaas cloud services. Here are our notes: [[internal/project/privatecloud/investigations|Software Investigations]] == Cloud Hardware == Susan expressed a serious preference for open source software running on commodity hardware. That way, commodity hardware could be repurposed, even if the cloud project failed completely. Against that, Peter Pietzuch strongly recommended that we also investigate commercial scalable storage systems - specifically NetApp "scalable NAS" units. We are investigating these and will report back soon. Possible hardware to buy will be added later, we have done quite a lot of work.. coming soon. |
DoC Private Cloud
Project Goal
Build a DoC Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud, very like Amazon EC2 ("Elastic Compute Service") which presents a secure and convenient web interface which enables users of DoC to specify and create VMs and associated storage, automatically install OSes on them and deploy them.
The main goal is to virtualize most research servers, decoupling the OS image from the hardware for greater flexibility. Sharing (amortizing) the costs of each machine. One driver of this is EPSRC deciding to only provide 50% of any hardware bid over £10K in future, with the Dept expected to pay the remaining 50%.
This project will definitely proceed, having been approved by Executive Committee and by two open meetings of Academic staff.
Peter McBrien (PJM) is leading the project, and has laid out two stages:
- a 6 month phase in which CSG (advised by an academic working group) will design and build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, possibly for 6 months in the first instance. The Department will spend some significant amount of money to build the prototype cloud, perhaps in the £100-200K range.
- assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers would then be encouraged to add research-funded hardware to the cloud and given some form of preferential treatment on "their hardware". All members of CSG are enthusiastic to gain cloud-related skills from the "Cloud Manager". (By the way, the Cloud Manager will do non-cloud-related systems administration too).
Most crucially: (despite not knowing the exact set of services to provide, let alone how to implement them, or having yet appointed a Cloud Manager person) the Department's £100-200K investment must be fully spent before the end of July. This means that all kit must be ordered, delivered and paid for before the 31st of July. With the Olympics making deliveries difficult, this means that everything must have been ordered by 1st July.
Re: amount to spend, Anne O'Neill (AON) and Peter McBrien (PJM) suggested CSG prepare possible collections of commodity hardware, on the assumptions that either £100K, £150K and £200K (inc vat) would be spent.
Background
In January 2012, Susan told DCW that DoC were thinking of hiring someone for 6 months into CSG, specifically tasked with building a DoC private cloud. Exec Committee had agreed this, were happy to spend some significant pot of money - this financial year.
She explained the core idea was "virtualisation even for research clusters": at present, research groups buy clusters when they have money, CSG set them up, install "linux du jour" on them [which changes each year], configure fileservers (if part of cluster), tape backups (if part), processing node special software etc.
Then the servers age, the OS is essentially frozen (it's often difficult to persuade researchers that we should reinstall their fileservers, webservers and compute nodes). They become "fragile". Sometimes it's hard to even retire them on schedule (4/5/6 years or whatever). Also these clusters are often only accessible by members of that research group so the resource may not be fully utilised.
Susan's vision: setup a private cloud, researchers add hardware to that cloud's core resources, then create a VM for each cluster node, perhaps tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, the creation process should automatically install a CSG-supported operating system (historically supported Linuxes and Windows versions) on the new VM. Researchers work as before on each VM - but each node is encapsulated inside a VM. Later, these VMs could share resources - when the group don't need 100% resources, or new more powerful hardware is purchased.
We would also gain to flexibility to create short-term VMs for specific "run this software" experiments. They would then be automatically destroyed.
We could even give every DoC user (students and staff!) their very own VM when they join, with full root/admin access - or at least the ability to create one when they first need it (lazy evaluation:-)).
Various discussions with CSG, PJM and AON followed, clarifying things quite a lot.
Open Staff cloud meetings
In April 2012, the discussion was opened out to all interested staff, and (so far) two open staff cloud meetings have been held. Here are some notes taken by DCW and LDK of the discussions at both meetings.
Open Staff Meeting 1 - April 3rd 2012
Open Staff Meeting 2 - April 25th 2012
Cloud Services and Software Investigations
CSG have been performing initial investigations of hardware to buy, whether all commodity or investigating commercial filers like NetApp, and possible software that might be able to implement some/all of the required iaas cloud services. Here are our notes:
Cloud Hardware
Susan expressed a serious preference for open source software running on commodity hardware. That way, commodity hardware could be repurposed, even if the cloud project failed completely.
Against that, Peter Pietzuch strongly recommended that we also investigate commercial scalable storage systems - specifically NetApp "scalable NAS" units. We are investigating these and will report back soon.
Possible hardware to buy will be added later, we have done quite a lot of work.. coming soon.